April 20, 2005

Out with the Old, In with the New -- Does It Make Any Difference to Healthy Eating As Long as We're Still Dieting?

I can hardly stand all the noise around the release of the new healthy eating graphic – the revised version of Food Guide Pyramid. My frustration isn’t with the new graphic – it’s with all the ‘experts’ expounding on the problems with the old one. My favorite quote: “The pyramid was partially responsible for the obesity epidemic…because it aggressively pushed a low-fat and high-carbohydrate diet,” says Dr. Arthur Agatston, creator of the South Beach Diet. My gripe:

1) How can you blame the ‘obesity epidemic’ (I’ll address the reason for the quotation marks in a later post) on the Pyramid WHEN NO ONE EATS LIKE IT RECOMMENDS???? For example, most people eat only one vegetable a day – and guess what kind. French fries! Turn the pyramid upside down, with all the sweets and low-nutrient foods at the bottom, followed by meats, cheese, etc., and then you get a better picture of how Americans actually eat.

2) Where do people really get their eating advice? From diets! People really learned the low-fat, high-carbohydrate mantra from the best-selling diet books of the 80s and early 90s. And of course, Dr. Agatston would have problems with those because his diet book promotes a lower-carb approach.

Until people stop dieting and start eating normally, we’re going to have a hard time with healthy eating, no matter what graphic guides us, to say nothing of achieving and maintaining healthy weights.